Sony's Actively Pushing for Sturdier Game Performances on PS4

Sony’s hoping that the added horsepower of the PlayStation 4 will put an end to inconsistent frame rates and low resolution visuals. Chatting with Eurogamer.net in a recent feature, Just Add Water’s head honcho Stewart Gilray revealed that the platform holder is “actively pushing” for games that run at 60 frames per second on its next generation system, as well as at a full 1080p.

Chatting about the technical differences between Sony’s console and the recently revealed Xbox One, he said: "We might see slightly smoother frame rates on the PS4. We're working with Sony right now, and they're trying to actively push 60FPS, 1080p. You might get situations where the graphics will be a little, but not much, lower quality on the Xbox One.”

Gilray added that developers aiming to “push the heck” out of the PS4 may have to compromise their vision for Microsoft’s machine. “You might have to do some little tweaks [for the Xbox One version],” he explained. “But if you design your game to work on the Xbox One at 60FPS, it's going to work on the PS4 at 60FPS."

Of course, the proof will be in the pudding. The real takeaway at this point in time is that the PS4 will not be hindered by the shoddy ports that the PlayStation 3 received. And after almost seven years of excuses from third-party developers, that’s something that we’re really looking forward to.

I don't think there's really any excuse for technical problems on a piece of hardware like the PS4. I don't think there's going to be much lenience for games that perform poorly - it's already depressing to see some titles run badly on the PS3.

Things like frame rate problems especially should be a thing of the past. 60fps is a beautiful thing after you've been playing a lot of 30fps games, even better at 1080p. Even if we're not getting 60fps in all games (Killzone Shadow Fall is supposedly 30fps isn't it?) they need to at least be locked at a constant rate, drops be damned.

50% more power concening the GPU (graphics), the CPUs are more or less equal in power as it seems. But nonetheless, the PS4 is a beast.

Btt: Sony pushing for 1080p @ 60FPS is good news. Even if games will sometimes just run @ 30 FPS, I sure hope they'll go for native 1080p with every game. About time I can enjoy games in the native resolution of my TV,

@ShogunRok Yes, Killzone ran in 1080p @ 40fps...although keep in mind that it was an early demo built that used around 3GB of Ram, since Sony upped to 8 Gigs quite surprisingly, even for their developers. So maybe we'll see the game in 60fps at launch.

I agree, though. At least lock the framerate for a constant experience.

It's all good news, but I've never been particularly interested in these side-by-side comparison things that CVG and co. often use to generate hits.

Even on PS3 and 360, there's very little difference between games these days, and unless you have each system, two TVs, two heads, four arms and four eyes, you're not going to tell the difference between them anyway.

@Paranoimia Same here, although there is a difference with first party games that were built specifically to maximize the hardware of the PS3. Yet at the same time, you'll never see Uncharted on a 360 to compare anyway, so yea.

@Reverend_Skeeve it's an APU, which combines the central and graphics processing units. It uses the same resources to prepare the data and render it too. Xbox one is 50% slower at doing everything that PS4 can do. I think actual gameplay will prove the importance of the PS4's "extra" power when there's lots of atmosphere or models on-screen

@charlesnarles Thanks for the correction! From what I read, I thought the "CPU part" of the APU is pretty much equal between X1 and PS4, because both APUs have a transistor count of about 5 billion, if I remember correctly.Since MS had to find a way to avoid the DDR3 bottleneck, they had to include 32MB of fast ESRam as a sort of Cache. To not exeed their "transistor count budget", they had to "take some away" from the GPU-part, resulting in the X1s GPU only having 12 compute units, whereas the PS4s GPU has 18, resulting in 50% more raw power in the GPU part of the APU.